Description: Looking north-east along the then A61 (Derby Road - after 1977 redesignated as the B6179) with the extensive buildings and bottle kilns of Denby Pottery on the right. The Pottery's spoil heap where waste material extracted during the mining and refining of the clay was tipped can be seen in the distance, as can the group of houses known as The College. Quite prominent in this view and running north from Derby towards Ripley, the parallel twin pole routes for telegraph wires were a feature of this road in the inter-war period.
Denby Pottery was established in 1809 to manufacture stoneware bottles, being run by Joseph Jager in partnership with Charles George Brohier initially. However, in 1815 William Bourne of Belper Pottery took over, the Belper operation being closed down in 1834 with the equipment and workforce moving the short distance to Denby. In due course other potteries at Codnor Park and Shipley were similarly subsumed. By the 1860s the firm was styled Joseph Bourne & Son and it continued to trade as such until 1970.
Production in the 19th century comprised a diverse range of everyday stoneware items such as telegraph insulators, ink bottles, pickle and marmalade jars, spirit and liquor bottles, foot warmers, churns, mortars and pestles, pipkins, feeding-bottles, moulds for pork pies and puddings, chemists' shop jars, jars for snuff, spirit barrels, and water filters. A few more decorative wares were also manufactured.
Following various changes of ownership and name, the Pottery entered the 21st century as the Denby Pottery Co Ltd with production concentrated on tableware. Of the buildings shown here, the nearest one survived (albeit with its ground floor arches now infilled with windows), but the sheds and kilns beyond had been replaced by a more modern frontage, probably dating from the 1950s or early 'sixties. Likewise the spoil tip had been landscaped away and the site used to create a car park.
This photo was taken by Derby-based postcard publisher F W Scarratt and was allocated the number 1515 in his series, being titled 'Denby Potteries'.